About

The purpose of this blog is to provide readers with information about low carb diets and help them make informed decisions about the best foods to eat to promote a healthy lifestyle.

I’ve been what most people would call a “healthy eater” for many years. I’ve always been a big fan of cooking and chalk it up as being a natural result of my artistic abilities. When most people my age were getting their driver’s licenses and heading out to McDonald’s to celebrate, I was going to the grocery store to get fixin’s for The World’s Largest Club Sandwich.

When I went off to college and had to start making 100% of my own food choices, I avoided the Easy Mac and Pizza Rolls. Instead, I learned how to properly poach an egg and steam asparagus. I even ended up as a volunteer coordinator in the produce section of a tiny co-op by my campus. I know, I know. I’m a total weirdo when it comes to food. Always have been, always will be.

When the whole Atkins craze swept the nation, I thought it was a joke. Just another fad diet. Everyone knows you can’t become healthy eating nothing but steak and fried eggs, right? I’ve been pro-produce for such a long time and even borderline vegetarian for a bit, so I couldn’t really see the value of “low-carb.” Well, most people on the Atkins stopped after a short stint, and that viewpoint was verified in my mind.

It took several years later for me to actually come back to the concept and take it seriously, although in a roundabout way. I started to ask myself: If every animal on this planet has an easily identifiable “natural” diet, shouldn’t we have one as well? What can we learn about the diet that our hunter-gather ancestors thrived on for such a long time? This led me to the so-called “Paleo Diet,” and the concept that sugars and grains were rarely eaten by our forebears and the resulting natural diet was… low carb.

After some research, I found that a lot of people seemed to be looking for lists and charts of carbs and glycemic indices of different foods, presumably low-carbers of many stripes looking for the resources to make informed choices. So I figured, what the hell. I’ll jump in, make a blog filled with lots of carb data for lots of different types of food and see what people get out of it.

So where do we go from here? I have a plan mapped out that should take us through several months, by which time I hope this blog has found enough of an audience to become more collaborative and give me an idea of the breadth and depth of low carb topics that I can cover.

So first off… The Low Carb Food List! The name kinda speaks for itself, huh? If a blog with that name doesn’t have a great list of low carb and low glycemic foods, then it’s obviously a sham. Over the next week or so, I will be releasing lists of the foods that I think are eaten 95% of the time and list off carb, glycemic index, and glycemic load data for them all. I will then include these as easy-to-access pages that anyone can use for reference. I want to create a resource for people who want to find this data, but are frustrated with pages that either don’t have enough information or are SWAMPED with figures on every food known to man.

After these lists are up, I’m going to briefly go over a few important aspects of low carb diets, things that everyone should know if they are thinking of adopting this lifestyle.

After this, I’m going to go IN DEPTH and provide carb and glycemic info on as many types of food as I can find data for, breaking everything up into categories. For example, when we are learning about vegetables, I will have separate posts on roots and tubers, greens, flowers, etc. I hope this will help us determine which “types” of food are best for us without feeling the need to break out the scale and calculator at every meal.

One last note: the data that I will be reporting is primarily from two sources. I used CalorieKing to calculate effective carb values and David Mendosa’s fantastic Diabetes website to find glycemic index and glycemic load data. Both resources are highly recommended if you want to do your own research.

I hope you find this to be a valuable resource. I appreciate any and all feedback I get.